"Intel's is not the processor in the iPhone," a spokeswoman for Apple in San Francisco told Reuters by telephone, denying an earlier statement by a spokesman for Apple Germany who had said the processor was Intel's.

At first this seems quite perplexing. Why would Intel be providing chips for such a "wimpy" device in the AppleTV and not for the relatively beefy iPhone? While standard or even mobile Intel processors would be able to power the graphics demanded by Jobs, it probably would have readily sucked down power faster than... well, lets just say it would probably have less than 5 hours of talk time.

We here at the Ars Orbiting HQ believe that the culprit is none other than Samsung, who makes a part perfect for the iPhone. After a little digging, we also found that FBR research is also pinpointing a Samsung CPU as the brains of the iPhone. FBR Research believes that the suppliers for the major components in the iPhone will be:

Samsung Electronics for the CPU/Video processing

Marvell for the 802.11 chipset

Infineon Technologies for baseband communications

Broadcomm Corp. for the touch screen controllers

Cambridge Silicon Radio for the Bluetooth chipset

With this information in hand, it looks like Apple is taking an iPod-like approach to the development of the hardware for the iPhone: picking and choosing very specialized and efficient parts instead of simply pulling parts off the shelf (which would have been prohibitive, if only for size reasons alone).